


Expectation

by Lindentreeisle (Captainblue)



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, hurt/comfort bingo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-20
Updated: 2011-06-20
Packaged: 2017-10-20 14:03:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,294
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/213541
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Captainblue/pseuds/Lindentreeisle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Gonna shoot me, Watson?” the man said, his throat still hoarse with dust and muted by the sound of rushing water.</p>
<p>“I'm not much for cold-blooded murder, Moran,” John said.  “Besides, I'm not going to be able to walk out of here without help.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Expectation

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to lady-ganesh and thesardine, my brutal but encouraging betas.

John choked on water and concrete dust, vomited, and gasped. Every inch of his body felt tenderized, and his leg was trapped under him, misshapen and screaming. He heard a series of chest-rattling coughs and fumbled to point his handgun at the figure he could dimly see leaning against a tumble of rock.

“Gonna shoot me, Watson?” the man said, his throat still hoarse with dust and muted by the sound of rushing water.

“I'm not much for cold-blooded murder, Moran,” John said. “Besides, I'm not going to be able to walk out of here without help.”

Moran laughed, then broke off into a coughing fit, stooping over. “And why the fuck would I want to help you walk out of here?” When he stood back up he had a very compact gun in his fist; it must have been in his boot. “Stupid to admit you're helpless.”

John kept his breathing even. “How does your back feel?” he asked. He couldn't see the wound, but he could see how torn and bloody Moran's shirt was, and the way he was hunching his shoulders. “You can't reach it to clean or sterilize it. So, you know, go ahead and shoot me. I hope the memory is worth dying of septicemia.”

Moran considered that for a moment, then lowered his gun. John did the same. Moran tried fruitlessly to dry his gun on his soaked shirt before he set to work trying to clear an opening in the rubble.

By the time Moran finished his escape hatch and piled up loose rubble beneath it, the moon was up, and John had painfully worked his leg out from under him. Moran reached up for a solid grip on the edges of the hole he had made.

If John thought begging would work, he would try it. But murderers didn't tend to be susceptible.

“Leaving me to starve to death?” John asked, stifling his terror. “Classy.”

“Getting some sleep,” Moran said. “Don't worry, Watson. If I like what I see up here come morning, I've got a bullet for you.”

How reassuring. Moran hoisted himself up and wiggled his hips through the gap, disappearing into the night. John could hear him settling in, safely out of reach. John was absolutely exhausted, but this was not a restful situation. Most of the time Moran was a ghost: a list of kills, Sherlock's case notes on motives and contracts, a whisper of trouble leading them to this tiny village and a pair of candidates for Moran's next victim. For ninety seconds on the day they first met he had been very real indeed, dangerously cold green eyes, a stocky body tight with well-honed muscles, and a pair of steady hands wrapping John in Semtex. John vividly recalled those ninety seconds; he had little else to fixate on, sitting alone in the dark.

He was still awake when Moran got up and walked away; John had a very quiet and prolonged panic attack during the time he was gone, and tried not to look pathetically relieved when Moran climbed back through the opening. “Everyone's gone,” Moran said.

So the holdouts had either died, or been forced to leave. Which category did Sherlock fit into? That the flash flood had come as John had caught Moran lining up his shot from an aging, ivy-weakened bridge was just bad luck. The second potential target, the one Sherlock went for, had been up the hill, above the flood line. The authorities would have needed to evacuate Sherlock by brute force, knowing him.

Moran dumped a small load of broken planks, only lightly damp, next to John. “Tie your leg up, and I'll get you out,” he said, and went to lean against the wall under the hole.

John wriggled out of his rain jacket and shirts, then went to work at the vest with his teeth. John did not especially want Moran to touch him, but he couldn't help finding the man's obvious apathy inhuman. John's vision went white at the edges when he tied knots in the fabric strips, binding the wood tightly to his leg.

When Moran helped him up, it took an effort not to flinch away from his hands. John kept all his weight on his good leg, but he still stubbed the broken one against the ground several times. Every jolt sent a flare of agony from his ankle to his knee, but John gritted his teeth and refused to acknowledge it. Moran climbed out, and then John jumped with his good leg and tried to pull himself the rest of the way. The jump was shit with so little leverage, and Moran had to grab him by the shoulders and haul him out bodily, wrenching his old wound and dragging his hips painfully on the concrete. Laying there, watching the water rush by less than a foot from the pile of debris he'd been trapped in, John found it very hard to care.

Yesterday, the trip to the bridge had been a ten-minute jog up the hill from the village. With John hobbling along leaning on Moran- his skin crawling from the contact- it took more than an hour before they came round a bend and could see the main street. The river had washed out the road here at its lowest point, and flooded most of the village. The houses had water up to their ground-floor window sills, and the cottage nearest the bank had half of one wall knocked in by a largish chunk of bridge. Cars parked on the street and alongside the houses were mostly submerged in brown water.

Moran led him into the yard of an elderly detached home that had evidently been high enough to escape flooding. There was no car in the drive, but a child's bicycle had been abandoned in the mud, and there was most of a cord of firewood on the porch under a tarp. Moran dumped John by the stone hearth in the sitting room, where he lay panting with effort and in rather severe pain. Moran went back out onto the porch and returned with an armload of wood.

"Power's out, and water," Moran announced. John rolled his eyes, gritted his teeth, and hitched himself closer to the fireplace. He got a fire going and sat as close as he could without being burned, resting his leg while Moran explored the house and set out pans to catch the rainwater. When he returned, he was carrying a large bundle of bed linens and clothing from which he unloaded two torches, a British Red Cross first aid kit, a bottle of iodine, a box of plasters, two sealed bottles of water, and what looked like most of somebody's medicine cabinet. He was shirtless and wearing a pair of track suit bottoms. "I brought you some dry clothes," Moran said. He gave John a tight little smile, a bit of faked camaraderie that turned John's stomach. _I don't trust you. We are not in this together._ "But do my back, first."

"Open the blinds, then come sit in front of me," John said, not bothering to argue. Moran's back was ripped to shreds, although he had miraculously avoided anything deep enough to need stitches. Still, it took forever to wash his back, remove a few stuck chips of cement with the aid of tweezers, and bandage all the abrasions. He used the antibiotic cream as sparingly as he could, but the job still took almost half of it. He used up all the gauze pads, too; when he checked and re-bandaged everything he was going to have to use bedsheets, probably.

When he was done he poked through the bottles and packets of tablets. Mostly useless and sadly no prescription painkillers, but he found some paracetamol, swallowed two with the aid of the bottled water, and tossed the bottle to Moran. He pulled off his shirts again with some effort and put on a t-shirt and a baggy sweatshirt that Moran had brought down. The lack of dry trousers suggested that service was not on offer, and John was quietly glad. He felt like he had Moriarty's fingerprints on him where Moran had touched, and he didn't care how absurdly illogical that was. The man murdered not out of necessity, but for business or for fun; or at least Moriarty's idea of fun, which was worse.

John took his gun apart and cleaned it as best he could with scraps of bedsheet, listening to Moran rummage through the house and trying not to think about how this was someone's _home_ , because needs must. He got so absorbed that he didn't hear Moran come back in, and it startled him when something small and hard thwacked into his shoulder and dropped to the floor. John glanced at Moran and picked the item up: tiny bottle of gun oil. “Um, thanks,” John said, surprised back into his default reaction of politeness.

Moran shrugged. “You've got a nice gun.” He smiled the way John remembered from the pool, all white teeth and dire promises, and John thought darkly about what motivated kindness in serial killers.

The food in the fridge was still slightly cool to the touch; they cooked omelets in a frying pan over coals they raked onto the hearth, and split what was left of a bottle of lukewarm orange juice. After dinner, Moran located the liquor cabinet and perused it with interest, although he didn't drink anything. He did take out a bottle of good scotch and set it aside, and answered John's questioning look by saying, “Second-best kind of OTC painkiller.”

“Maybe I should hang on to the paracetamol,” John said slowly.

“No,” Moran said, smiling slightly. “I don't think so.” John's leg still hurt like a son of a bitch even _with_ the drug, and he tried and failed not to feel alarmed at the implicit threat. It stayed implicit, though: when the sun was going down, rain still drumming on the roof, Moran brought the bottle of pills and doled out two for each of them.

Moran sat by the window and played with his phone for a while. Reception had been awful even before the storm and the floods, as Sherlock had learned to his disgust upon their arrival, so it was unlikely to help them. John's own phone had vanished from his jacket pocket during their merry journey off the bridge.

Eventually John was left to curl up in a nest of blankets on the hearth while Moran went upstairs. He tried to feel humiliated and couldn't. Moran had left John to sleep by the fire as deliberately as he had chosen a house with front steps and a first floor, chosen not to provide John with anything he could use for crutches, chosen not to describe anything he'd found while scavenging, chosen to hold on to the paracetamol. It wasn't humiliation, it was _control_.

John slept fitfully and woke early, with light just starting to seep through the windows. He could hear Moran moving around upstairs. He started poking through the fireplace looking for buried embers as a way to ignore the searing pain in his leg, and had managed to coax a few back into an eager flame by the time Moran appeared. John took the paracetamol tablets from his hand with an automatic "Thank you," and turned his face away, ashamed at how absurdly grateful he felt. The drug did little but dull the pain, yet John was sure he couldn't hold himself together without the meager relief it gave.

Moran found two tins of beans in the kitchen and they dumped them in the frying pan from the omelets. He did some more poking and found a toasting rack in the cabinet under the sink, which for some reason set him laughing fit to kill. There was half a loaf of bread so they had beans and toast. The rain slowed to a drizzle, and Moran went out and poured their accumulated rainwater into one pot which he brought into the house.

"I'm going to look around some more," Moran announced, picking up and checking one of the torches. "Keep the fire going, and boil the water."

"You know, I'm not actually an idiot," John said.

"Only trying to help, Watson," Moran said, stuffing the torch into his pocket. He'd changed back into his jeans. "I know you like to feel needed."

If John had something suitable to hand, he would have thrown it. Instead he had to settle for glaring and snapping, "Oh, piss off." Moran laughed.

John had been in a lot of places he hadn't wanted to be, with people he hadn't wanted to be with. But this was the first time since Afghanistan that he'd felt so truly trapped. There was always a plan to make, a tool to use, or at least Sherlock to back him up. Now there was just Moran.

John suddenly couldn't bear to be sitting in the same place any longer. He hitched himself backwards until his thigh muscles screamed with the effort of holding his broken leg off the floor, then used the sofa to drag himself up far enough to get his good leg under him. He wavered, bent over and clutching the back of the sofa for support. By leaning heavily on furniture he was able to hop and shuffle to the kitchen doorway. He got around all right as long as he had heavy things or walls to lean on, but after a morning spent dragging his leg around it was clear that he'd never make it on open ground without support. He spent the afternoon reading a true crime novel he found in the study and trying to ignore his fucking, fucking leg. By the time Moran returned, he had paged through half the book without comprehending any of it.

The rain had started coming down harder again, and Moran was soaked and annoyed. He dropped a loaded rucksack on the floor and started to strip off his wet clothes in the sitting room.

"I don't suppose you found a transmitter," John said as Moran began to unpack a couple more bottles of water and other assorted loot from his rucksack.

"No such luck," Moran said. "I did find these though." He held a packet of cigarettes aloft with every evidence of triumph.

"Your shirt's soaked through," John said. "Let me get what's left of the bandages off."

After he peeled the wet gauze off Moran's back, John cut up what vegetables he'd found in the kitchen and stir-fried them in a little oil, then boiled spaghetti using chicken broth instead of water. Not gourmet, but filling. He glared at Moran while he prepared it, daring him to say something degrading about his new role as homemaker, but Moran barely looked at him. They drank the boiled rainwater to preserve the limited supply of bottled water. Moran left his shirt off, and when they were done eating John said, "Come over here and let me re-do your back."

Moran sat hunched and silent while John carefully washed and re-bandaged all his cuts, mostly using re-purposed bedsheets. Everything still looked clean and infection-free so far, although they were going to run out of antibiotic ointment soon. Tomorrow or more likely the day after, the cuts should be healed enough that John could let them breathe a bit. Oh God, were they still going to be here tomorrow or the day after? Was John still going to be alive after he took the bandages off?

Moran produced the cigarettes again. "Smoke?" he offered. "I'm gasping."

"No." John watched him shake a cigarette out of the packet and light it, inhaling with obvious pleasure. It reminded John of the blissed-out expression Sherlock had worn when John caught him just after he'd gone through nearly half a bottle of nicotine nasal spray in under an hour. (He never got the second half, and John had an extremely frank discussion with the doctor who'd prescribed it.)

It was strange to see this extremely human side of Moran, but ultimately when John looked at Moran all he could think was _Robert Jefferson, Labor MP, Christian Gowers, prison snitch, Hannah Brigley, witness to the murder of her mum and dad_ and on and on until he cut himself off with a grimace of disgust.

John realized that Moran had been studying him in return. "Did you hate all the insurgents you fought in Afghanistan the way you hate me?" Moran asked. "That must have been fucking exhausting."

"They were different," John said automatically, realizing as he said it that it was a weak answer. The acts weren't different, certainly: assassination, bombings, and evidence of every other cruelly vicious act had all came under John's hands. The victims weren't always soldiers, either.

"No they weren't. Your problem, Watson, is you've lost your sense of perspective." John kept his face carefully blank when Moran gestured at him with his cigarette. "It's just a job. I love my work because I'm damn good at it, but that doesn't make it personal."

"You're just following orders," John said, smirking a bit and hating himself for finding the old justification funny.

"We all do it," Moran said, taking another puff. "You, me, the Taliban."

"I don't murder people," John snapped. Moran laughed outright at that. John thought of the cabbie and felt uneasy.

"You follow Holmes like a dog and beat the shit out of anybody he tells you deserves it," Moran said. "We've got the same fucking job, Watson."

"Is that how Moriarty thinks of you?" John said, bristling at the echo of the pool in Moran's words. "His dog?"

Moran shrugged. "He has the plan, I make it happen. I do my job. Everything else is just gravy."

"My gran bred border collies when I was a kid," John said. "That was basically their view of things, too."

Moran stubbed his cigarette out against the wall. "Fuck you." He went upstairs. Ten minutes later, he returned and sullenly flung two paracetamol at John, then went up to bed without saying another word.

The third morning, they had beans and toast again, using the last of the bread. Moran didn't say anything to John, so apparently Sharing Time was over. John tried very, very hard to pretend that he didn't care whether Moran talked to him or not. He went out scavenging again, and brought back a load of canned goods from another, better-stocked house. Dinner was canned corn and a moderately vile canned ham. John already missed the toast.

The one positive of the day was that the rain stopped shortly before dark, and a lot of the clouds seemed to have cleared. If the weather held, that would make it easier for aircraft to get through, if any of them wanted to get through. The Search and Rescue Force only had so many choppers; it didn't seem likely they would use them doing flyovers of areas that they knew had been fully evacuated.

“You still haven't shot me,” John said while he was re-bandaging Moran's back. John could no longer conceive of an existence where he wasn't asking himself _why_ with every inhale. “Anyone would expect you to.”

Moran shrugged slightly, and lit another of the cigarettes from the pack sitting in front of him. John stilled his hands for a moment, waiting for him to settle.

“Is it harder to kill someone, when you've met and lived with them?” John asked.

Moran snorted. “No,” he said. “Is it harder to hate me, having met and lived with me?” No attempt to couch the question in John's detached language.

If John had met him earlier, this encounter might have turned Moran from a monster into a real person. But having seen Moran eat and smoke and feel emotions wasn't enough at this point; it would never be enough. “No,” John replied.

They sat silently, Moran smoking, John touching and stroking and taping. When he was finished, Moran scooped up the cigarettes and stood to put on his shirt. He tossed the butt into the fireplace.

“I don't do anything unless I want to do it,” Moran said. “Don't call me a dog again.”

The fourth morning, they had beans without the toast. There were some terrible wheat crackers that Moran had found in the same place he got the canned goods, but it wasn't the same.

“You're disappointing me, Watson,” Moran said. “I was starting to think you were the Jamie Oliver of disaster cookery.”

They were boiling the last of the rainwater when they heard the helicopter.

Moran was out the door in a second. John struggled upright with some effort, using the pain to keep himself from flying completely into a panic. Oh God, what if Moran didn't come back? He didn't have to say there was another person here. How long would John be trapped here with limited supplies and no medical care before the road was clear and people started to come back?

John made it halfway to the door before it slammed open again and Moran was standing there, his expression vacillating between delight and disgust. “It's the fucking _BBC_ ,” he said.

It was in fact the fucking BBC, with a cameraman and a reporter doing footage and commentary, respectively, on the collapsed bridge. The reporter looked as if a lifetime of Christmases had come at once. “This is incredible, no one had any idea you were here!” he gushed in a way that made John want to punch him. “The air ambulance is coming, but we have a few minutes for an interview- I mean, I'd really appreciate-”

“No bloody interviews,” Moran snapped. “This man is injured, he needs a hospital now. Four days ago, actually.” Of course, Moran had a vested interest in not appearing on camera. This wasn't over yet. “Stumble,” he hissed in John's ear, almost inaudible.

John managed to stumble in such a way that he fell on his good leg, but acted the distraught victim so well that it flustered the reporter entirely. There was no more talk of interviews before the pilot briskly told his passengers that they had to lift off so that the EMS helicopter would have someplace to land.

While John spoke to the EMTs during the short ride, Moran sat in a corner tapping away at his phone. The ambulance and another camera crew met them at the airfield, and it was the perfect time to make a fuss, tell someone that Moran had been on that bridge with a sniper rifle to kill Amos Targer. Be the proper sidekick, backing up Sherlock even when he wasn't there.

_I don't do anything unless I want to do it._

Maybe he didn't want to be the proper sidekick this time.

When Sherlock bulled his way into the examining room, they had finished discussing John's x-rays and the nurses had just cut John's jeans off, which was hardly the reunion scene he had envisioned. Still, it was strangely fitting; as was the wild, accusatory way in which Sherlock greeted him. “I thought you were _dead_ ,” he said, glaring dramatically from the doorway.

“Well I didn't get stranded just to irritate you,” John said. “I was stuck under a bloody collapsed bridge, wasn't I?”

Sherlock's glare didn't waver. “See that it doesn't happen again,” he said.

John grinned. Oh God, oh God, what was his life that he actually found that touching?

“Mr. Watson, you're shaking,” one of the nurses said. John noticed that yes, he was shaking quite a bit. “Are you cold, having trouble breathing?”

“Don't be stupid,” Sherlock said. “It's not shock, just adrenaline crash.” He had seized John's wrist and appeared to be taking his pulse. John found it hard to credit that he had really been in a continuous state of fight-or-flight for four straight days, but he was noticing a marked contrast between how he felt now and the tension he'd been carrying in his muscles so long he'd ceased to notice it.

A doctor and two very angry looking security guards appeared in the door. “Sir,” said the taller guard. “We're going to have to ask you to leave.”

“No!” John said. Everyone in the room was startled by the vehemence of the word, including John. “Look, I'm sorry, but I've been stuck in a flood zone for four days, he thought I was dead.” John pointed at the muted television in the corner, which was showing BBC News footage of the flooding with the headline “Two men stranded by bridge collapse.” The security guards dutifully followed John's finger.

“All right,” one of the guards said. “He can stay, provided he goes back to the waiting room.”

Sherlock looked rebellious. “But-”

“Sherlock, wait in the damned waiting room. I'm not going anywhere, trust me.”

Sherlock gave the security personnel one more glare before he flounced his way out of the room. John watched the telly distractedly while he waited for the painkillers to kick in. They'd already told him it would be a closed reduction, no surgery required, so with any luck they'd be able to give him a cast and discharge him in a few hours. The BBC had stopped showing the collapsed bridge, now they were running footage from the airfield. Fabulous. John was glad the sound was off. And there, sidling around the medical personnel and out of shot, went Sebastian Moran, caught on film despite himself.

“ _JOHN_!” Apparently John wasn't the only one watching; Sherlock's outraged bellow reached him all the way from the waiting room.

And John lay back on the gurney and laughed, and laughed, and laughed.

**Author's Note:**

> Nox_candida has written [an utterly fantastic remix](http://archiveofourown.org/works/816712) of this story. I strongly, strongly encourage you to read it.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Expectation (The Mosaic Remix)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/816712) by [nox_candida](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nox_candida/pseuds/nox_candida)




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